Antique Hockey Stick Goes On Sale

Interesting hockey memorabilia-related story out of Canada that we totally missed yesterday:

Photo: Getty Sports Images. And this should go without saying, but this is NOT the stick in question.

After spending the past three years documenting “the provenance of the vintage sporting artifact, which he bought from a Cape Breton barber who had it on display for decades in his North Sydney, N.S., shop,” 44-year-old Mark Presley is ready to sell.

The owner of a curved hunk of maple wood, carved from a tree cut down about 170 years ago in Nova Scotia, has revealed plans to sell the object — which may well be the world's oldest hockey stick.

By retracing the stick's ownership through several generations of the Moffatt family, a settler clan that was farming outside of North Sydney by the early 1800s, Presley compiled considerable archival and other evidence that the object was probably used in early, shinny-like games of "hurley" at a popular skating site called Pottle Lake.

The 2006 sale of another, somewhat younger stick from 19th-century Ontario, which reportedly went to a private collector of hockey memorabilia for $1.9 million, suggests the Nova Scotia relic could fetch a significant price.

Question: Does the purchase of the “hand-hewn, maple wood hockey stick — believed to be among the oldest hockey sticks in existence” include the Band-Aids, tweezers and gauze necessary to remove all the splinters the buyer’s sure to get while handling the thing or are those items sold separately?

Side Note: Also, in case anyone’s is in the market for a totally awesome stick that we might or might not have broken into pieces when we were seven after slamming it into the ice and blaming it on our younger brother, we are currently accepting offers.